The contents in a letter written by Valerie Abu on the night she was murdered promulgated a senior consular official at the British High Commission in Accra to contact the Foreign Office in London.

Simultaneously, Andrew Blake, in conducting the annual audit of his company’s accounts in Takoradi, discovered a discrepancy in the stock levels of mined diamonds which gave a strong indication that substantial amounts were being systematically syphoned from one of the company’s mines and subsequently taken out of the country. This shortfall would normally have been investigated internally, but due to a number of incidents occurring, the Board of Directors had no alternative but to hand the matter over to the authorities.

The Foreign Office assigned Keith Reynolds to the investigation. The case was a complicated one and made more so by two further murders, one in Ghana and the other in England; the latter only coming to his attention when it transpired his main suspect involved in the diamond smuggling had visited the victim on the day he was killed.

The demise of Isabella Blake, the owner of Blake Publishing in Edinburgh, surprisingly provided another link when, once again, the same name was mentioned.

Keith methodically worked his way through a quagmire of undercurrents, many of them perplexing, right up to the end when he finally reached a satisfactory conclusion.